Scientists observe light acting like a river | Hacker News Reader

Scientists observe light acting like a river

sciencealert.com

38 pointskinnth3 comments

Not to ask the dumb question, but one of the challenges discussed in the lay video is that it's hard to study when the medium is consistently prone to fail (pop)

What's stopping this test from being attempted on a frozen bubble? My guess is that the crystalline structure of ice is different enough to change the behavior of light, but at the same time, a lot of the variances in the thickness of the bubble would be preserved, no?

This is reminiscent of the branching pattern seen in a plasma disc. (you know those things that are flat versions of plasma globes) As I understand it , emission from a plasma requires a high energy electron dropping to a lower energy with photon emission. The path of the 'collapsing energy' is linear - meaning each emission event triggers one nearby- unzipping a river of lower potential in a sea of high energy plasma. Interestingly, the directional changes of branching plasma seem to occur at sharp angles with relatively straight paths connecting the branch points.

With light however, the cascade of photons is fractured into separate rivers as bundles of photons are refracted continuously by the smoothly varying thickness of the bubble. Freezing the bubble might create crystals where the thickness is not smoothly varying so angular paths might be observed as the light jumps from one crystal to the next

I hadn’t heard of sciencealert before, so I clicked the home page and it’s full of click bait content. Very high noise, low signal stuff, and the ads are just awful.

> Plus, if the video can be looped, it'll make for an absolutely baller screensaver.

This line in the article really got me, lol, and made me question the source of information.

Some other articles:

> There's a Weird Structure in Our Inner Ears That Hardly Anybody Talks About

> That 'Human Bone' Found in a NASA Mars Photo Isn't Even New. Here's The Real Story

Here’s a link to the actual paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2376-8

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